The ability to easily and reliably establish that a document (a computer file) has existed as of a certain date, and further that is has not been altered by tampering since that date, has been an elusive target for certain types of documents. Document types for which an easy, reliable date proof has been a particularly elusive goal include 1) documents which have been kept in secrecy since their creation, as well as 2) documents which are retained in an uncontrolled or poorly-controlled environment, such as on a website that is susceptible to easy modification and alteration by computer hackers or even the website owner.
The ability to reliably date prove such documents could provide significant beneficial results. For example, in a patent dispute, if one party attempted to claim earlier development of an invention, by producing documents that had been previously held confidentially as trade secrets, the other side may bring accusations of backdating the documents. Using cryptographic methods as part of the proof that an electronic version of the document existed as of the claimed date, as well as to prove that no information had been added since that date, could reduce cost and uncertainties in comparison with the prevalent method of relying on human recollections and honesty in an adversarial legal proceeding. As used herein, the term document includes both humanly readable documents and other digital files, including data files, executable software programs, and files in encrypted, compressed, and/or fitting defined file formats. The term electronic document includes both word processing files, ASCII text files and other digital files, including data files, executable software programs, and files in encrypted, compressed, and/or fitting defined file formats.
Additionally, if a PTO examiner, performing a prior art search for a pending application, discovered a document on a website that allowed revisions to posted pages and used that document in a 35 U.S.C. § 102 or 103 rejection, the patent applicant will challenge the rejection as relying on an improper reference, because it may have been revised to include the referenced passages after the application's priority date. The PTO currently has no response to such applicant arguments, unless an examiner is able to find a copy of the contested website document that had been archived in a reliable database prior to the claimable priority date. The PTO and other organizations facing a similar document dating issues lack the resources to independently generate and maintain date-provable databases of all potentially valuable internet documents. Some internet document archiving services do exist, but due to storage requirements, these databases archive only a small percentage of available documents. Additionally, the selection of documents for retention is outside the control of most users who would later need to rely on the archive, and further, the purported dates of the archive entries can typically be questioned and contested by opponents in litigation.
A prime example of a failure by others, to solve the problem that it is currently cost-prohibitive to prove the dates of various revisions of document held in poorly-controlled environments, is that the PTO has policies against using many potentially valuable website pages in 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103 rejections.
This is a significant matter. Either the PTO is inexplicably excluding a large amount of easily-searched information from the examination process, thereby denying patent examiners access to a valuable resource that could simultaneously ease their burden and improve patent quality, or else the PTO's policies are effectively an admission that a large-scale solution for reliably establishing dates for website pages has not been found and is therefore not obvious.
A prime example of a failure by others, to solve the problem that it is currently difficult to prove the dates of documents held in secrecy, is the relatively low adoption rate of trusted timestamping solutions. Some attempts have been made in the prior art to address date proving documents that are held in secrecy. However, these have so far failed to meaningfully solve certain problems and achieve widespread adoption, because they have multiple security vulnerabilities, require multiple conditions that are uncertain to exist, and are subject to compromise at unpredictable times.
Many industry experts, and even cryptographic standards organizations, teach away from the concept that establishing a document date is possible without all interested parties finding a common entity to trust for time keeping. That is, the current paradigm requires that the document author, or any other asserting party attempting to establish a document date, and the document challenger must both endorse a single entity's credibility, which cannot have been compromised or lost through unethical action by insiders, malicious activity, accident, or computational advances that render the trust mechanism obsolete.
One of the prior art solutions is to provide a copy of the document to a document archival services provider. At a later time, upon needing to establish the date of the document, the records of the document archival services provider are subpoenaed and used to establish the date that the document was placed in secure, archival storage. Unfortunately, this solution is expensive, due to storage and record-keeping requirements and so, as can be expected, relatively few organizations use such a service. It also has multiple security weaknesses, including potential corruption of the services provider employees; forgery of archival records unknown to the services provider; loss of the document by fire, flood or theft; and that the services provider is out of business at the time its services are needed to verify the document date.
Another prior art solution is to use a timestamp from a trusted timestamping authority (TTSA). The document author, who wishes to preserve a document in secrecy, can hash the document, send the hash value to the TTSA, who combines the submitted hash value with a timestamp, hashes the combination to produce a second hash value, digitally signs the second hash value with a private key, and returns the signed hash value along with the timestamp information to the document author. The document author then stores the signed second hash and timestamp information with the original document.
At a later time, upon needing to establish the date of the document as that indicated by the timestamp, a verification process is performed. The document is hashed again by a party trusted by both the document author and the party challenging the document's asserted date, and the hash value is combined with the timestamp. This combination is then hashed to produce yet another hash value for final verification. In parallel, the digitally signed hash value provided by the TTSA is decrypted with the TTSA's public key, and the result is compared with the final verification hash value. If there is a match, the TTSA's credibility is used as the basis for trusting the document date indicated by the timestamp.
However, this process requires some critical assumptions and carries significant risk. The TTSA must be trustworthy, the TTSA's private key must not have been secretly compromised, and the TTSA's public key must be available from a trusted source at the later date, when the document is challenged. If the TTSA is corrupt, or even if it is trustworthy, but the document challenger is skeptical, then this prior art scheme will not work to convince the challenger of the document's date. Even worse, if the TTSA's private key is ever stolen, all documents, for which the timestamps had been signed by the stolen key, lose their date provability unless some type of remedial action is taken. A mere single careless act by one employee of the TTSA, or only a single successful hacking attempt, is required to defeat this entire prior art trusted timestamping system. Further, similar to the reliance on the document archival services provider remaining in business, if the TTSA ever ceases operations, it may be difficult to prove the date of a document. This is because the TTSA is no longer around to confirm the validity of its public key. Anyone asserting that a document has been timestamped by a defunct TTSA can identify any key as the alleged public key, and the TTSA entity won't exist to refute the assertion, allowing the possibility of a forgery.
Thus, there exists a need to establish a system for reliable date proof and tamper indication of documents, which is not vulnerable to the security weaknesses and risks of the current trusted timestamping and archival processes, and is further easier to use, more reliable, and likely less expensive than using either a TTSA or a document archival services provider. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,285,999 ('999); 6,799,176 ('176); 7,058,628 ('628); and 7,269,587 ('587) to Page (collectively “Page”), are hereby incorporated by reference as teachings of prior art.